Business Education Alliance

Archive for the ‘Small Business Alliance’ Category

Micro businesses with no employees, or between one and nine employees, accounted for 94.6% of all UK businesses in 2001, 29% of employment and 21.2% of turnover.
Approximately 3.1 million people were self-employed in 2002, according to Social Trends 33, 2003. An additional 1.35 million people have some income, or losses, from self-employment. Self-employed men outnumber women by nearly three to one. The proportion of self-employed in the working population has fallen since 1987.
Around 20% of the UK’s self-employed work in the construction industry. Between 13% and 14% are involved in diverse business activities, around 7% work in recreation, culture and sport, and a further 7% in health and social work.
Nearly three-quarters of the self-employed had a self-employment income of less than £15,000 in 2000/2001. NatWest is fully aware of the problem of low income in self-employment and hopes its business managers will help customers to develop their businesses and increase their profits.
In December 2001, the Competition Commission reported on banking services for business and accused the banks of failing to offer good value competitive services to small businesses. The banks have responded with improvements to their services for business and now cater much better for micro businesses.

One of the most overlooked aspects of business is the employee manual (aka employee handbook). Many business owners don`t even consider this until it’s too late and they are running into problems. Your best bet is to develop an employee manual as soon as you consider hiring your first employee, to make sure your expectations and company procedures are clearly outlined.

1. Orient your employees and let them know what is expected of them. An employee manual is particularly useful for new employees who need to know what the procedure is for specific tasks and how to handle things. After reading an employee manual, your employees will be far more familiar with how the business is run and what is expected of them. This is a great way to ensure that any new hires are going to be on top of their game and it also makes it easier to train them.

2. Save time. Training new people is a tedious task in many cases, so anything that will help cut down on the time spent doing so is a good idea. A new employee can refer to the manual when he or she has a question and their coworkers won`t need to leave their own work in order to answer the same question several times. It takes a while for these new staff members to get up to speed, but there`s no reason for them to slow others down if you have a way for them to check policies and procedures when they need to without having to disturb other employees.

Many small business owners fall into the trap of trying to do everything themselves. It`s easy to do, particularly if you started out on no budget and as the only person working. However, once your small business has grown a little, it`s time to start letting go and become more efficient.

How does a small business owner become more efficient? There are a few ways to save yourself both time and money by making everything easier to run.

Start outsourcing. By doing everything themselves, small business owners usually feel that they are saving money, but the opposite is often true. When you spend three hours working on something that a professional could do in an hour for $50 and your time is worth twice that . . . you`re losing money and it`s just not worth it. Not to mention, a professional will be able to do things that you probably haven`t even considered. For example, just about anyone can put together a rudimentary header for their blog, but a graphic artist will be able to turn out one that actually draws people in.